Daymark
Health

It's a Tuesday night, well after the clinic has locked up. A woman three weeks into chemotherapy is staring at a fever she doesn't understand and a phone she isn't sure she's allowed to use. This is the moment Daymark Health was built for - the gap between appointments, where most of cancer actually happens.

Daymark Health is a Philadelphia-based cancer care company that does something quietly radical: it shows up when the oncologist's office is closed. Through a hybrid of in-home visits and virtual care, its team of nurse practitioners, nurses, licensed clinical social workers, and health navigators handles symptoms, side effects, anxiety, and the logistics of getting to treatment. It works alongside a patient's existing oncologist, not instead of them.

Pictured in spirit: the 8,500 hours a year a cancer patient spends outside the clinic. Daymark wants the receipts for all of them.

Cancer doesn't keep clinic hours.

Roughly two million Americans are diagnosed with cancer every year. They get superb care during their appointments - and then they go home, where the system mostly stops. By Daymark's own estimate, patients spend more than 8,500 hours a year outside the oncology clinic. Those are the hours when a manageable side effect becomes an ER visit, when the fear sets in, when the ride to treatment falls through.

The care is fragmented. The support is thin. And the cost of all those avoidable crises lands on patients, providers, and health plans alike. It's an inconvenient arrangement that everyone has agreed to tolerate for a remarkably long time.

A Penn oncologist decided the gap was the product.

Daymark was built out of the venture studio Healthcare Foundry and led by Dr. Justin Bekelman, who previously ran Penn Medicine's Center for Cancer Care Innovation at the Abramson Cancer Center. He'd spent a career watching the clinic do its job well and the hours around it do nothing at all. Co-founders Robert Pahlavan and Jonathan Rhodes helped shape the thesis.

The bet was structural, not sentimental. Instead of selling a feel-good service, Daymark would partner with health plans and take on risk for the total cost of cancer care - betting that better support between appointments would mean fewer emergencies, and that the savings would more than pay for the care. Compassion, it turns out, can also be a business model.

Also on the bench: former Humana CMO Roy Beveridge (Executive Board Chair) and ACA architect Ezekiel Emanuel (Clinical Advisory Board Chair). Not a lineup you assemble by accident.

Stealth to scale, in about a year.

One number. Five jobs. Around the clock.

Daymark's supportive cancer care program reaches patients by phone, text, video, and home visit. Behind the friendly front door sits a multidisciplinary team and a technology platform doing five things at once:

It is, essentially, the friend who happens to be an oncology nurse - except this one answers at midnight and files the paperwork.

Patients, plans, and capital all showed up.

Within its first year of operations, Daymark grew to support more than 2,500 cancer patients, starting with a Northeast health plan and expanding through partnerships including Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. Investors followed the patients: a $11.5M seed in April 2025 and a $20M Series A in September 2025.

Two rounds in six months. The cancer-care market is enormous; the patience of its patients is not.

Redefine the experience - for everyone in the room.

Daymark frames its mission around three audiences at once: patients who need support to live through treatment, providers who can't be everywhere, and health plans looking to spend on care that actually works. Its job is to deliver evidence-based supportive care that handles the clinical, mental health, and social needs that traditional oncology was never built to reach.

The value-based structure keeps everyone honest. Daymark only wins when patients have fewer crises - which means the incentive and the mission point in the same direction. A pleasant novelty in healthcare.

The gap is the opportunity.

With fresh capital, Daymark plans to forge new partnerships with health plans and providers across the country and bring its platform to more patients. Two million new diagnoses a year, multiplied by 8,500 unattended hours each, is a problem large enough to absorb far more than one company - and specific enough that getting it right would change what a cancer diagnosis feels like.

Back to that Tuesday night. The woman with the fever picks up her phone. Someone answers - an oncology nurse who knows her name, her treatment, and exactly what to do next. No drive to the ER. No guessing. The clinic closed hours ago, but the care didn't. That's the change Daymark is selling, and increasingly, the one it's delivering.